The SaaS Podcast - Real Lessons on Growing Profitable SaaS

Grant Deken spent six years building and selling an influencer marketing platform called Grapevine. During that time, he watched hundreds of advertisers struggle to update their websites. That frustration became the seed for Unstack, a no-code platform competing against WordPress, Webflow, and Unbounce. The competitive differentiation that set them apart had nothing to do with features. Unstack fo...

Sonny Patel started Insurmi out of his dorm room after seeing how outdated insurance technology was. He spent 18 months building a B2C comparison site before carriers asked to license his software. That pivot changed everything about his SaaS sales process. Insurmi leveraged three industry-specific accelerators to build a startup sales pipeline of 130+ enterprise prospects without cold outreach. S...

Paul Campillo was a social worker helping adults out of San Quentin find jobs. Then he accidentally filled out a Typeform job application and became their first marketing hire. Five years later, he helped grow the company to 100,000 customers, 300 employees, and $52M in funding. His SaaS branding approach has nothing to do with logos. Typeform built its SaaS branding from employee #28 to 100,000 c...

Shruti Ghatge sent 2,500 cold emails and got zero replies. She and her co-founder spent eight months building InVision prototypes for their niche SaaS without writing a single line of code - and customers never knew it was not a real product. Zomentum validated a niche SaaS opportunity in IT managed service providers - an underserved market processing $200B in services - through 450+ customer inte...

Nicolas Vandenberghe told his first potential customer he could build them a solution for $20,000. They paid upfront. That pre-sale launched Chili Piper's journey to build a SaaS without funding that reached cash positive in 10 months and $5M ARR before raising a dollar. Nicolas shares how companies lose over 50% of inbound leads between form submission and sales follow-up because nobody owns the...

When Nick Mehta joined Gainsight in 2013, customer success as a category did not exist. There were no tools, no job titles, no conferences. He did not just have to sell software - he had to convince the entire SaaS industry that customer success was a thing worth investing in. Nick shares the four-question framework for creating a new category: why anything, why technology, why now, and why us. Mo...

Jeffrey Tiong started PatSnap with a $40,000 university grant, spent a third on servers, and took two years to ship a product full of bugs. His path to early traction started when he pleaded with a university librarian to become his first customer. Founder-led sales was the only option. Jeffrey reveals how he accidentally discovered that R&D departments were easier to sell to than IP lawyers, buil...

Rob Loewenthal walked away from running a radio network to build a podcast platform in one of the most crowded markets in SaaS. His SaaS branding strategy: stop thinking about hosting and start solving for engagement. While competitors focused on file storage and Apple distribution, Whooshkaa built transcription, cloud editing, and smart home integrations into one platform. Rob reveals how this co...

Three PhDs in Greece spent two years building a self-funded SaaS product in a bunker. When they emerged, nobody wanted to buy it. It took another full year before they found their first customers. Starting a SaaS during Greece's worst financial crisis meant European prospects questioned whether the company would survive. Panos Siozos reveals how LearnWorlds broke through by targeting the US market...

Blake Bartlett did not just study product-led growth - he coined the term. As a partner at OpenView, he has invested in companies like Calendly, Datadog, and Expensify that define what self-serve SaaS looks like in practice. Blake breaks down the new customer journey where the product leads and sales follows. In the old model, sales led through SDRs and demos over 30-90 days. In self-serve SaaS, u...

Baskar Agneeswaran spent two years building a price comparison app that failed. His team's core strength was mobile development, not backend data infrastructure. When they aligned their skills to the Shopify SaaS marketplace - building mobile apps for e-commerce stores - traction came quickly. Launching a marketplace app on Shopify changed everything. Baskar reveals how Vajro priced at $25/month i...

Qwilr's freemium SaaS experiment looked perfect on paper - virality went up, signups surged, and the pipeline was full. Then the numbers told a different story: activation dropped 50%, the sales cycle ballooned from 14 to 60 days, and revenue growth fell from tripling to just 80% year over year. Free users mostly attracted more free users. Mark Tanner breaks down exactly what went wrong with their...

Abdullah Alsaadi failed at four different startups over four years - a crypto app with no market, a Salesforce tool blocked for 18 months, a delivery company that could not scale, and a delivery management SaaS with impossible integrations. Then he pre-sold 5-year subscriptions to four restaurants before writing a line of code, and used that money to build Taker. Abdullah shares how he got his fir...

Arvid Kahl spent 5 hours a day on a train commute reading books and listening to podcasts about building SaaS businesses. Every previous idea had failed. Then he and his partner Danielle built FeedbackPanda - a simple tool for online English teachers - and completed selling a SaaS business for seven figures in just 2 years. But the path to that SaaS exit nearly destroyed Arvid's mental health. He...

Jeroen Corthout built a CRM extension that nobody wanted to buy. Prospects could not see the value of adding another tool alongside their existing CRM. Then he noticed something unexpected - smaller companies were using his product as a full CRM replacement, not an extension. That insight became the niche SaaS positioning that grew Salesflare to over 2,000 paying companies. Jeroen shares how he sp...

Jacob Eiting posted his new SDK on Reddit and got destroyed. People called him a rip-off middleman. His beta launch attracted just 5 signups. He had no revenue and was living off his wife's income. Getting startup traction seemed impossible. So he started writing. He spent 6-12 hours a week publishing content that answered the questions mobile developers were already searching for. Slowly, SEO tra...

Alex Theuma had no background in events and no great business idea. He just started writing about SaaS. A blog turned into a podcast, which turned into meetups, which turned into a B2B community building success that drew 700 people to Dublin in its first year. By 2020, SaaStock was running SaaS community events across five continents with 4,000 attendees. Then the pandemic wiped out his revenue o...

Three college grads in India spent $150 on Google Ads and got zero leads. So they tried something different - they turned their help docs into blog posts, distributed them through forums and co-marketing deals, and built a SaaS content marketing engine that took Trackier from zero to $2M ARR. Udit Verma reveals how Trackier bootstrapped to 350 customers without spending a dollar on paid advertisin...

Romain Dardour spent four years trying to make his first product work. By 2016, Hull was a month away from shutting down. Then a lunch meeting with a growth marketer friend changed everything. The friend did not care about the product but loved how Hull collected and segmented data. That was the moment Romain started finding product-market fit. In five days, Romain and his co-founders built a prot...

Rachel Liaw discovered that roughly half of Fuse Inventory's revenue was coming from the wrong customers. They consumed disproportionate support, requested the wrong features, and were never going to succeed with the product. So she made the painful decision to let those contracts expire - and it transformed the business. Average contract values grew from $1,000 to $3,000-$5,000 per month. Rachel...

April Dunford almost killed a product that would eventually generate over $1 billion in revenue. Her team thought it was desktop productivity software, but the six customers who loved it were using it as an embeddable database for mobile devices. That competitive differentiation only emerged through SaaS positioning work that forced them to talk to every single customer. April shares her five-comp...

Wes Bush watched Vidyard's freemium SaaS product hit 100,000 users and realized that product-led growth was a fundamentally different engine than sales-led. The product was not just something you sell - it was the growth engine itself. That insight led Wes to develop frameworks that help SaaS founders decide on free trial conversion strategy. Why listen: Learn the MOAT framework for deciding betwe...

Paul Joyce spent four years testing a dozen startup ideas. Every single one failed. Then he built Geckoboard, a SaaS metrics dashboard, launched on Hacker News, and got 800 signups but zero paying customers. He quit his day job anyway with five months of runway. Today Geckoboard does over $5M ARR. Why listen: Learn key SaaS growth lessons from 12 failures, how SaaS metrics education became Geckobo...

Luke Thomas sat on a business idea for three years before writing a single line of code. His first customer paid $45 a month. He spent the next three years building early traction to $10K MRR using SaaS SEO strategy and scrappy content marketing SaaS tactics - all while keeping a full-time job. Why listen: Learn how a SaaS SEO strategy of 30-40 long-form blog posts drove organic growth, how leavin...

Matt Barnett recorded personal videos for leads on his morning ferry across Sydney Harbor. The sound quality was terrible - but prospects loved it anyway. That scrappy startup traction experiment became Bonjoro, a customer acquisition startup now with 40,000 users built on viral growth and organic traction. Why listen: Learn how building virality directly into the product created a startup tractio...